It’s pretty unusual to hear a minister speaking during this election campaign: other than Mel Stride, the rest seem to have gone to ground entirely, either because they want to save their own seats or because they don’t want to be associated with the campaign at all. So when Steve Baker popped up on Andrew Neil’s show on Times Radio this lunchtime, that in itself was pretty remarkable. The Northern Ireland minister then accepted that the Tory betting scandal looked ‘terrible’, and did not bother to defend the delay in suspending the two Tory candidates who are alleged to have placed bets on the election date. He merely said:
The public deserves to know that we hold ourselves to a higher standard than we hold anyone else and also, of course, if war is a continuation of politics by other means, and our very old saying, we should remember that politics is war minus a shooting and one should never expose a flank. So whether for political reasons or just out of sheer respect for the public, we should maintain very high standards and stick to them and just the implication or the impression that somebody might have placed a bet on inside knowledge is totally unacceptable.
Baker also didn’t bother to defend the quality of the Conservative campaign. He said ‘with the campaign going as badly as it has’, before saying ‘it would have been pretty extraordinary if we had won a fifth successive general election’. He sounded like someone talking as if the exit poll had just landed, rather than while he and his colleagues were still out trying to win every vote they possibly could. Baker has always been very forthright, and clearly thinks that distancing himself in this way from the national campaign will benefit him in what is a very tight race in High Wycombe. But it is fascinating that Conservatives are now more willing to hold a public post mortem than they are to go out and argue for their party.
Comments